Antonio Penta is the recipient of a European Research Council Starting Grant for his project, “Strategic Uncertainty in Economic Environments and Digital Marketing Agencies.” In this short video, Penta talks about the project’s objectives, challenges, and potential impact for the field and for society.

Project abstract

The project will be conducted in three parts. The first part, joint with Larbi Alaoui (UPF and Barcelona GSE), aims at understanding the interaction between individuals’ incentives, cognitive abilities and strategic behavior. This research combines both theoretical and experimental work, bridging tools and ideas from game theory, computer science, psychology and economics.

The second part pursues a classical game theoretic approach to study problems of “strategic uncertainty”, that is situations of social interactions in which agents don’t necessarily have correct expectations about the environment.

The third part, joint with F. Decarolis (EIEF) and M. Goldmanis (Royal Holloway), aims at studying the impact of the diffusion of Digital Marketing Agencies on the auction formats most commoly used to sell online advertisement space. These auctions are used, for instance, by firms such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc., and account for a huge and growing market worldwide.